Melissa Vernon- Director Sustainable Strategy, Interface Flooring Meredith Elbaum- Sasaki Associates The Many Shades of Green Do we know what the green labels mean (like Forest Stewardship Council, Green-e etc)? Why do we trust them. What eco-green labels do you use and trust? Some are full-cycle, multi attribute labels while others are only single point or single factor labels.  Melissa and Meredith discussed their work on researching sustainable building materials and provided examples of online tools and resources. New Tools for choosing sustainable building products and materials:  The BEES (Building forEnvironmental andEconomicSustainability) software for selecting cost-effective, environmentally-preferable building products. Another lifecycle assessment tool is Pharos it takes into account social components in purchasing building materials.  The bottom line is that full lifecycle assessment of products is important in deciding which products to purchase.Key insight: many ”˜green' products fail, or are perceived to fail because they have different maintenance requirements that people may not be familiar with. For example, waterless urinals have different maintenance than normal flush urinals (see Building Green.com Big Savings from Waterless Urinals for a discussion of this issue) Adam Smargon- Graduate Student, University of New Hampshire Buy Green, Be Greener: The Theory and Practice of Green Purchasing WWII: citizens told to conserve energy and other resources. Post September 11th and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: Not told to conserve, or make sacrifices. Buy, Buy, Buy! Bigger homes, bigger cars etc. -Global consumption spending has increased six fold since 1950 -Wealthiest 1/5 of worlds population owns 87% of all cars (UN) -1/5 of humanity lives on less than a dollar a day. What can we do? Re-work the manufacturing process to use less energy, reduce operational expenses, and reduce our demand for natural resources. Public Procurement is a tool that has been used in the past to achieve public policy goals, such as defense. Why should it not be a tool in achieving environmental concerns? We recycle way more than we purchase products made from recycle content. We need to complete the loop.